Bill and Hillary Clinton refuse to testify in Epstein probe as Republicans threaten contempt charges

Congressional Republicans are threatening to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress after the Democratic former president and presidential candidate refused to testify in a GOP-led House probe into Jeffrey Epstein.

A blistering letter from the Clintons to House Oversight Committee chair James Comer states that “every person has to decide when they have seen or had enough and are ready to fight for this country, its principles and its people, no matter the consequences.”

“For us, now is that time,” they wrote.

Comer told reporters Tuesday that the committee intends to hold them in contempt of Congress next week.

As chair of the powerful Republican-led committee, Comer has steered focus from an investigation into the sex offender and his alleged connections to a wider trafficking conspiracy implicating powerful figures, including President Donald Trump, and instead drawn attention to prominent Democratic figures who had previously associated with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

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Asked whether he intends to subpoena Trump, Comer said the president has already “answered thousands of questions about Jeffrey Epstein.”

“You all ask him questions every day,” he said Tuesday. “You can't bring in a current president.”

Comer had set a deadline for the former president to appear before the committee by Tuesday, with the former secretary of state and Trump’s one-time Democratic opponent set to appear Wednesday.

But in Tuesday’s damning letter to the committee, the Clintons condemned the subpoenas as “invalid and legally unenforceable” and laid out a searing indictment of the Trump administration and the alleged failures of a GOP-dominated Congress to hold it accountable — all in an effort to see them imprisoned.

“Despite everything that needs to be done to help our country, you are on the cusp of bringing Congress to a halt to pursue a rarely used process literally designed to result in our imprisonment,” they wrote.

“This is not the way out of America’s ills, and we will forcefully defend ourselves.”

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The Clintons also note that they have already supplied Comer with sworn statements that were also supplied to law enforcement officials he had also subpoenaed but excused from testifying “without any of them saying a single word to you,” they wrote.

Their eight-page letter, which torches the Republican-led government’s anti-immigration agenda and threats to healthcare, accuses Comer of working harder to hold them in contempt than pursuing an investigation into Epstein’s crimes and the government’s alleged failures to hold him and others to account.

“We have tried to give you the little information we have. We’ve done so because Mr. Epstein's crimes were horrific,” they wrote. “If the government didn’t do all it could to investigate and prosecute these crimes, for whatever reason, that should be the focus of your work.”

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The Clintons said they anticipated that House Republicans would continue to “release irrelevant, decades-old photos that you hope will embarrass us,” after batches of documents released by the Department of Justice include images of the former president with Epstein and others, on which the White House and Trump’s allies immediately pounced.

The Clintons have never been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and the inclusion of someone’s name or images in files connected to the cases against him do not imply otherwise.

“They can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn't about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be,” Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Angel Ureña said in a statement last month.

“There are two types of people here. The first group knew nothing and cut Epstein off before his crimes came to light,” he added. “The second group continued relationships with him after. We're in the first. No amount of stalling by people in the second group will change that.”

The committee’s long-running investigation into the government’s handling of Epstein-related cases is parallel to the ongoing release of the so-called Epstein files by the Justice Department.

Following months of public pressure for Trump to sign off on their release, the Justice Department began publishing thousands of images and documents from investigations into Epstein and Maxwell last month.

But the Justice Department has blown deadlines set by Congress for the complete release of those materials, drawing warnings from Democratic and some Republican lawmakers that legal action is not off the table.

Roughly 12,000 documents containing 125,000 pages have been released, and there are potentially more than 2 million files yet to be released, government lawyers said in a federal court filing last week.

The Justice Department has not released any documents since December 23. The deadline was December 19.

Initial rounds of long-awaited documents include vast libraries of salacious images and photographs of high-profile figures but have not shed any new light on Epstein’s crimes and connections to powerful figures accused of exploiting and abusing young girls.

Those disclosures include hundreds of undated photographs as well as heavily redacted images and case files.